


Last Man Standing

by FlufferNutterButter



Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: Little Romantic Relations, minor original characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-12 16:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2117382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlufferNutterButter/pseuds/FlufferNutterButter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be the longest week of their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Day

**Author's Note:**

> The idea is, and it would be nice if this would work out, that I post one chapter a day for seven days, giving the full effect of the week passing. I'll try.
> 
> Each chapter will be a day. Depending on the day, some characters' stories may be longer or shorter. Some might even have no content for a certain character at all.

_Wake._

Ellis blinked, once, twice, three times before his vision cleared enough that he could figure out where he was. Above him, he could distinguish the yellow of the morning sky and the dark shapes of trees and the wall of a house. He could see these things, but even so, he didn’t venture to right away; the mist over his vision may have dissipated, but the fog in his mind was still dense enough to incapacitate him a while longer.

He fell back asleep.

The second time he woke up was kinder to him; his mind no longer so clouded in that he was actually cognizant enough to form coherent thoughts. The first thought he had was the oh-so-important _“Where am I?”_

Quickly followed by “ _Who am I?_ ”

He sat up slowly, rubbing the pain out of his head. _Ellis, you dumbass. You’re Ellis._

“Hah,” he laughed, “Nick, that’d be just like you to-”

He looked around, suddenly feeling weak. His stomach dropped. He thought he was going to be sick.

“…Nick?" 

Ellis quickly struggled to his feet, staggering dizzily as he suffered a head rush. He reached an arm out in the air to regain his balance. “Coach? Rochelle?”

“Guys?”

By this point, he was panicking. Ellis grabbed up his gun and crowbar and started running with absolutely no concept of direction. He honestly had no idea where he was, he quickly realized, but that didn’t stop him. His still-tired body tripped over the uneven ground as he scampered in a large, lopsided shape, only stopping his targetless chase when he found himself where he had started. Then, he collapsed to his knees, looked up at the now afternoon sky, closed his eyes, and let the most desperate of all moans climb out of his chest and into the world.

It was his only companion.

Or, it was, until that moan, like the others, left him. Then, when he was really and truly alone, he got to his feet and began walking.

* * *

 

Once, in her first days interning at a local news station before hitting her big break at Eyewitness, Rochelle had been stranded on the side of a country highway with the local news crew when they’d suffered a blowout. Armed with the knowledge that they’d all be chewed out once they got back to the station for missing their opportunity, and that nobody would likely venture down the road to lend them a hand with replacing a tire, something none of them knew how to do, the majority of the team had dejectedly resigned themselves to a fate of waiting out in the sun in the middle of nowhere until somebody came looking for them 

But rather than kill time and kick dirt around, Rochelle took initiative and took to the street, powering across miles of worn asphalt until, a few hours later, she happened upon a gas station and an attendant who could help with the news crew’s problem. The reprimanding upon returning to headquarters still awaited them, but Rochelle was rewarded for her forward thinking and offered an actual paying job on the spot.

She focused on that memory as she trudged down the flat stretch of Georgia highway. Already exhausted, and beginning to succumb to the killer heat of midday sun beating on her back, she could feel her resolve and her concentration slipping away like the sweat slipping off of her body. She was becoming delirious, though that probably helped in her case, as she found it was easier to convince herself that she was heading to a gas station for help for a flat, not wandering, lost, looking for shelter in the middle of the apocalypse 

She couldn’t remember when she’d started walking. She couldn’t even remember why she’d started walking. Buried deep beneath her fatigue was a warning, a weak, flashing sign that read CAUTION: ENEMIES BEHIND.

But, she thought, if there were any enemies behind her, they would have caught her by now, what with how slow she was going. And since they hadn’t, didn’t that mean that there weren’t any? Didn’t that mean that she was safe? And if she was safe, couldn’t she stop and rest?

She had this discussion with herself over and over again, though her body never quite won out the right to relax. Mechanically, her limbs marched on, even when her mind had practically checked out.

But was the sky getting darker, signaling night? Or was that the backs of her eyelids, which could no longer stay open?

* * *

 

“Rochelle! Ellis! Nick! God _dammit!_ ” Coach angrily pounded his fist against a pine tree. How stupid could someone be, how ignorant could you get, that three fully-grown adults, and close companions, just slipped away? Disappeared? And more importantly, Coach cursed, how had he let them all get separated like that?

In the core truth of the matter, there was really no way Coach could have been blamed for the separation. He knew that, somewhere in his mind, but that didn’t stop him from raging at himself, as if taking all of the blame for the split would somehow bring them all back together.

He slumped to the ground, trying his hardest to put the pieces of the puzzle together in his mind. They lay around him, bodies of dead Infected, scattered throughout the woods. Coach chewed on his lip and concentrated.

Ellis, he remembered, taking a Jockey ride off the side of the highway and into a ditch, lay helpless and dazed from the ensuing blow to the head. Everyone slid down the incline after him, except for Nick, who picked his way down half of the incline by stepping on roots and rocks before one gave way and left him sliding anyway. Coach reached for Ellis to help him up once the Jockey was no longer an issue.

From there, though, things become tangled, and only bits and pieces can be assembled into a half-assed picture.

On the one hand, he remembered a strong blow to the side, nearly having the life pummelled out of him, and the sight of white-clothed legs retreating. But then, he could also recall a foot planted firmly in his palm, pushing a body back up to the road, and his own sore throat as he called for everyone to run.

Would he still have delivered that command if he knew that running would separate everyone?

Cold dread settled in Coach’s very core. He’d delivered the opposing line to his football players before games: divide and conquer.

* * *

 

Nick could, at any time, when prompted, rattle off a very extensive list of things he didn’t like. As of late, that list would begin with “Ellis”, include every zombie encounter he’d experienced, and probably end with the greasy little sponge of a man who had dared to call Nick a fraud to his face, spraying spittle as he did so.

Nick was a fraud, but that was beside the point.

At this moment, however, Nick was willing to scratch that entire list and start over, and robbing Ellis of his Number One ribbon would be the great celestial being known as the sun. That great mother beat down on him, scorching his hands and face, even as he bowed his head to keep from looking directly at it.

He’d long since foregone walking on the pavement, from which heat pulsed in painfully visible waves. Instead, Nick walked on the grass just off the edge of the road, tripping through unseeable holes and cursing more and more loudly as the rays melted away his patience. But he told himself to keep going; salvation looked ready to arrive in the form of a distant forest.

By the time Nick reached the trees, he’d shed both his jacket and his shirt, tying the latter around his head in an effort to shield himself. He loathed the buildup of sweat on both articles of clothing, and rejoiced at his luck when he found that, just at the edge of the man-made forest, there was a rest stop. 

There was no working plumbing, but around the back of the building, shielded by the building and the surrounding trees, Nick found an ice box. Thanks to the surroundings guarding it from the sun, the box hadn’t heated up to become an electricity-less oven; that was to say, though the cooling was no longer working and the ice inside had melted, the ensuing water had not, in fact, become too hot. And to Nick’s scorched physique, even slightly warm water was cool.

After dousing himself and enjoying the relief, Nick set about to hand-washing his clothes in the shallow water at the bottom of the ice box, using some soap he’d lifted from the gas station. It was the splashing of water and the rare banging of limbs on metal that shielded him from all other noises, so he didn’t hear the approaching party until one of them spoke.

“Hey, look who it is!”

For a moment, Nick thought that maybe, the others had found him. Had somehow stuck together, despite three of them winding up going in completely different directions, and tracked him down despite his random escape route. But that was a fleeting, weak wish. The moment after he registered the voice, he knew who it belonged to.

Nick sighed, looking straight ahead at the cinderblock side of the rest stop. Then, he let his head hang, gazing at his wavering reflection in the water.

“It could have been anyone,” he said, “But it just had to be you, didn’t it?”


	2. Second Day

“So then I said; ‘What police?’” Francis guffawed at the end to his own funny story, but Zoey and Louis rolled their eyes and shook their heads in unison. If Nick had thought that Ellis’s stories were bad, Francis’s were nothing short of horrendous.

Francis frowned at his travelling companions. “Well, I bet if your lady friend were here, she would’ve laughed.”

Nick glared stonily at Francis, internally swearing that if the greasy biker-type made one more unsolicited comment about Rochelle, he’d take him down. Loath to admit as he was, Nick still felt that the loss of his group was a wound, a smarting wound, and he tried his hardest to not think about it.

The other survivors weren’t keen on letting that happen, though; all three of them tried again and again to coax from Nick a story, to find out what had happened to the rest of the bridge crew.

_“… It had to be you guys.”_

_“Well,” Zoey crossed her arms, “You’re not much of a prize either.”_

_Louis backed her up. “Pretty sure we would’ve preferred someone else, too.”_

_“Yeah, like your lady friend!” Francis said loudly._

_Nick scowled at his reflection. “Rochelle,” he said, quietly correcting Francis, but not actually wanting to engage him in conversation. Everyone else was quiet then._

_Zoey was thinking to herself, Francis’s words raising a question in her mind. “Uh… where are the other guys in your group, anyway?”_

_Nick reached into the ice box, swirling his blue shirt in the water to rinse it off a little more, and then pulled the clothing out, shaking the water off with a snap of the fabric. “I don’t know.”_

_“You don’t know?” Zoey said, pitch raising in disbelief._

_“That’s what I said.” Nick looked around for a place to hang his shirt to dry. Nothing came to mind. He sighed. “Isn’t Florida south?”_

_“Detour,” Louis said. He inclined his head towards the late-afternoon sun. “West of here, there’s a big river, feeds right into the Gulf. If we can find a boat…”_

_“Well then, good luck.” Nick grabbed his suit jacket and gun and headed to the back door of the rest stop, trying the knob. Locked. He looked over his shoulder at the other three, and then purposefully walked around the other side of the building, heading for the front, but avoiding them._

_The front door was locked, too. Nick swore under his breath, struggling with opening it, and then trying to kick it, testing the strength to see if muscling it open was even possible. Meanwhile, the other three had walked around to the front of the building, and were watching him with mixed expressions of bemusement and question._

_Francis walked up to Nick, placing a hand on his shoulder to pull him back, and then took the butt of his gun to the glass. It broke, and Francis reached inside to open the door from there._

_“I could’ve done that,” Nick said._

_“Yeah, but you didn’t.”_

_“Didn’t ask for your help, either.”_

_“A simple ‘thank you’ is all we need,” Zoey said, brushing past Nick to join Francis, who was already inside. Louis trailed behind. Nick scowled, but went inside as well._

_Francis was ransacking the shelves, which were moderately stocked with food, but Louis had pulled Zoey to the side and was having a quiet, but intense, discussion with her. Nick ignored them, instead going about the rest stop for things that he deemed useful._

_“I fink,” Francis said after a little while, through a mouthful of whatever food he’d opened and taken to stuffing into his mouth by the handful, “Fat we fwud shay,” he swallowed noisily, “Here for the night.”_

_Nick was crouched behind the counter, searching the shelves there for first aid, and made a face. That had been his original plan when he’d found the place, since he was still exhausted from the blazingly hot walk. He stood, about to tell Francis what he thought of them staying there, too, but the words died in his throat when he saw how Zoey and Louis were watching him._

_“You know…” Louis began, “Florida to New Orleans isn’t that bad of a journey.”_

_Nick laughed darkly and shook his head. “Forget about it. That wasn’t my invitation. Or would you rather go track down someone friendlier to talk about this, like Rochelle?”_

_“That’s not what we meant,” Zoey said sharply. “All we’re saying is, Georgia to New Orleans is a long way to go on your own. You could at least come with us until-”_

_“I don’t need your help.”_

_“Oh, hell no!” Francis voiced his discontent from his place sitting on the ground. He motioned to Nick with an open potato chip bag, scattering crumbs in the latter’s direction. “We’re not gonna help him!”_

And yet, one shared night at the rest stop later, here they were, traveling together.

Nick wondered if there were some sort of cosmic prize for spending twenty-four hours with this crew, since he noted that the sun was beginning to set, he’d been with them all day, and as of yet, nobody was standing over any of the others’ dead bodies, holding the weapon of their destructions.

They entered the city limits of a small town just as the sky turned pink. Stories and idle chit-chat died on everyone’s lips, reduced to whispers about incoming Infected. Even that faded to silence when a cackle resonated through the streets.

Eyes peeled for the little shit running around, Nick at first didn’t notice the double whammy, the bait-and-hook, in store for one of them. Not until he caught sight of a dark figure scampering across a rooftop, and believed it to be the Jockey, and took aim…

Just as the Hunter descended upon Louis. Nick barely had to time shout, “Look out!” before his gun went off, blasting the Hunter back. Louis was a quick turnaround, and was immediately ready to take on the Hunter on his own.

And it was a good thing, too, because the momentarily forgotten Jockey had chosen his target.

“AH!”

The Jockey leapt onto Nick, grabbing his head and pulling around. Nick stumbled, trying to resist the Jockey’s influence, but it wasn’t easy. A second passed, two, and a thought ignited in his mind.

_They don’t care. They’re going to leave me to die._

But then, the Jockey and the thought were gone. The Jockey fell limply off of Nick’s shoulders. Zoey’s gun was raised.

Nick muttered, “Thanks.”

Coach couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Just before him, handed to him as if from God above, reaching down to hand him a gift, was the familiar symbol: safe house.

Maybe it was God’s way of saying “Sorry for making you lose all of your friends in the apocalypse. Here, have an easier day.”

Coach went inside, shutting the door behind him. He was hesitant, at first, to barricade it, holding onto the hope that maybe Ellis, or Rochelle, or Nick, would be on their way at any minute. But, slowly and tiredly, he pushed a cabinet in front of it.

He was following the path he’d planned to take to New Orleans. Even without the rest of his friends, he was still going to go; he could only hope they’d all have the same plan.

So he got what he needed, and then he left.

Ellis had walked for the better portion of the morning, had walked right past the spot where he stood now, and doubled back. He scanned the area, staring in disbelief. Yes, he knew where he was.

He’d inadvertently retraced his steps from the escape he’d made the other night, despite having no recollection of the night at all. But this was the ravine, he could see the Jockey that had taken him, now dead, and the charger that had gotten Coach. Among the Special Infected roster was also a Smoker. A scattering of Common Infected, no more than a dozen or so, also littered the grounds.

At this revelation, Ellis could feel hope rising in his heart; he scoured the surrounding trees and ground, searching. That hope began to fall away from him, though, when his amateur detective hour told him nothing about the locations or fates of his friends.

Ellis scowled, kicking the ground, and climbed out of the ravine. For the rest of the afternoon, he walked on sullenly, cursing every few minutes as he kicked his feet in the dirt. 

As the sun sank low, Ellis came upon a town. He recognized the name; he’d been there before, and the familiarity made him smile. He could remember a time, long before the Infection, that he and Keith had come here to try a local restaurant, one that boasted the best fried chicken and pecan and apple pies. Even if the restaurant wouldn’t have been kept up now, he still wondered if venturing to try was worth it.

 _Hell, why not?_  

He carved out the familiar path into town and to the restaurant, a skip in his step as he subconsciously willed the awfulness of his situation away. The country store and fried chicken joint was just ahead, he noticed, and as it got just barely darker, he could make out the flickering of a fluorescent light. His smile remained, but added to Ellis’s expression was a curious quirk of the eyebrows. He started jogging to the door. 

“Hello?” He called as he went inside. The light was in the back, over the counter. That was where he was headed, slowly and carefully. 

As he rounded the counter, he heard a growling. Immediately, Ellis raised his gun, ready to fire off a bullet into whatever was around the corner, and approached warily. 

But it wasn’t a Hunter that awaited him, it was a dog. A German Shepherd, possibly the biggest he’d ever seen. In fact, there was no way that dog was just German Shepherd. 

The dog had her lips pulled back, revealing her teeth, and her ears were pinned. She stood strong. 

Ellis lowered the gun a bit, cocking his head to look around the dog. It looked like she was guarding a body, probably her owner. Ellis took a step forward, a little to the side, to make his way around her, just out of curiosity. 

His path was cut off; the dog snapped at him, lunging, and when she did, the body moved a bit, too. Ellis jumped more out of surprise of the latter, his gun going to his shoulder again. But upon closer inspection, he realized that the body was, in fact, dead, a lifeless fist closed around the leash of the animal. 

He backed up, lowering his gun, and got on his knees in front of the animal. She’d stay here and starve, or be pinned by an Infected, if she remained tethered to this dead body. Ellis had an idea, and produced from his pocket a little bit of beef jerky, something he’d stockpiled when they’d last found a stocked convenience store. He held it out to the dog, lowering himself a little more. 

“Here, girl. Here you go…” he said softly. “Take the jerky.” 

The dog growled, but sniffed the air, and then slowly, she crept forward. She sniffed the jerky again. Then, she took the very end of it between her teeth and pulled it from Ellis’s grasp, gobbling it down. She then backed up, not having warmed up to him yet. 

Ellis sighed, pulling out another piece. He had a feeling he was about to lose most of his jerky stash. 

Rochelle didn’t have much memory of what had happened the day before. She’d been delirious and exhausted for most of it, having been moving without direction since the previous night. So she was understandably disoriented when she woke up, around midday. 

After a few head-scratching moments in which she painstakingly recalled as much as she could of what had happened, she found herself even more confused. She could remember trekking down the highway from dusk ‘til dawn, ‘til dusk again. What she couldn’t figure out was how she’d gotten from the highway to her current location, the dark interior of what, upon not-too-close inspection, appeared to be a Bojangles. 

Rochelle stood, stretching her stiff limbs and popping her joints. She took her hair down and shook her head, massaging it a bit to get rid of the tension. 

She sat back down then to think about her predicament. Her job had taught her how to prepare, and so she knew that she didn’t want to leave without a plan. But without the others, she felt disconcerted. Never since this whole thing had started had she had to act completely on her own like this; planning had always been a cooperative activity. There was always someone else to counter her idea, and through that, usually, better plans were formed. Now, she was going to have to cover all of the bases herself. 

“You can do this,” she told herself, and reached for her gun. 

She froze, hand in midair. No wonder she’d slept so long; the cheap carpet was a lot more comfortable when she didn’t have to subconsciously notice the weight of a gun on her back. But how had the gun been removed? And, upon inspection, she realized her axe was no longer on her person, either. In fact, she couldn’t see it anywhere. 

The mystery of her arrival became all the more real. Rochelle was sure, positive, that she hadn’t come to the Bojangles on her own. Somehow, though, she’d arrived here. 

Someone had brought her here. 

Rochelle checked the gun-no bullets missing-and shouldered it. She walked to the front counter, checking there, and back in the kitchen. The kitchen was dark, like the rest of the building, but all cooking surfaces were surprisingly clean. Rochelle headed to the back door then, and found a wooden chair with a flannel shirt draped across the back and what appeared to be a homemade spear, done out of a broom handle, piece of shrapnel, and duct tape. She didn’t touch anything. 

Out the back door, Rochelle was in the parking lot. In the heat, her exhaustion returned, and she realized she hadn’t eaten in quite a while. Still, she pushed the thought behind her and surveyed the lot. She wrinkled her nose at the sudden onslaught of the odor of exhaust, as if some old clunker had driven up, black smoke billowing out of its tailpipe. 

“Oh, wait,” she whispered, the “eureka” moment hitting. She sniffed again. Of course that was what it smelled like; someone had definitely been driving there. And with as few vehicles in the parking lot as there were, it wouldn’t be a difficult mystery to solve. 

The only vehicle of importance on the lot wound up being an old, beaten-up, brown Chevrolet truck. It wasn’t even the increased intensity of exhaust that gave it away, but the appearance in the truck bed of her axe. 

Rochelle grinned, taking the familiar weapon in hand. She checked the rest of the truck, but from what she could see, it was empty. And locked. 

And then, there wasn’t much else for her to check. Without another plan, she went back into the still-vacant Bojangles and sat at one of the tables, trying to work out a plan. 

She was still tired, though, and after trying and trying to focus, Rochelle just fell back asleep. 

She awoke again when the sun was low, and if there had been any doubt in her mind that she was not alone, it was vanquished. For, in front of her folded arms there were three things; a plastic water bottle full of water, a first aid kit, and what might pass for a biscuit wrapped in a Bojangles wrapper. Rochelle sat up, taking the water bottle and drinking from it in big gulps, and then she unwrapped the biscuit. It was hard, but it was food, and though it took some gnawing, she ate the whole thing. She fixed herself up with the first aid, and then, she waited. 

It was about time she met her host.


End file.
